MLB.com's Carrie Muskat has been covering Major League Baseball since 1981 and is the author of "Banks to Sandberg to Grace: Five Decades of Love and Frustration with the Cubs." You can follow her on Twitter @CarrieMuskat. Here, she blogs about the Cubs.

9/24 Gorzelanny lobbies for safer game

Cubs pitcher Tom Gorzelanny has had to deal with his share of comebackers this season, including a line drive by the Pirates’ Jose Tabata on Sept. 1 off his left hand. Gorzelanny made his first start since the incident on Friday against the Cardinals.

“It’s one thing you can’t control,” Gorzelanny said of all the flying objects. “Things happen, balls fly, they find people.

“With Tyler [Colvin], it was such a scary thing,” he said of the Cubs rookie, struck in the chest by a broken bat last Sunday. “It’s not shocking because of the way bats are these days. You see it all the time all year and they’re not finding people and the one time it does, bad things happen. You’ve got a guy with a punctured lung at home right now.

“Hopefully, something can be done about that,” Gorzelanny said. “It’s frightening. You don’t think as a guy on base, running the bases, you’re going to get hit. The closest person to getting hit is the pitcher. You’ve got baseballs flying back at you and bats flying back at you. It’s part of the game. You hope the bat aspect, you can control it. The ball, you can’t control.”

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